


bring it into the light

by clobf



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Fish & Chips, Pre-Relationship, an almost date, heavy handed use of light, this is just a love letter to late nights in london because i miss them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:27:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28763310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clobf/pseuds/clobf
Summary: “So, where are we going?” asks Melanie, and Georgie looks over to her, watches the glow from the restaurant windows catch on the golden rings in her ears. Melanie’s voice is excited, and in the light the gold is warm and burnished. It looks like adventure.Melanie and Georgie don't go on a date, quite, but they do go for dinner (and then they get chips)
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King
Comments: 10
Kudos: 32





	bring it into the light

**Author's Note:**

> BIG shoutout to the fic writers Discord for sprinting me all the way through this fic, and also to the collection of brits who brainstormed TMA chip orders with me, and also to the essay I'm neglecting right now

“You don’t like it.”

“I don’t not like it! I… am experiencing new and exciting cultures...and..salt.”

“Salt?”

“Salt.”

“You don’t have to like it, Melanie.”

Melanie points her fork at Georgie, glaring at her over the chicken paprikash _._ “Yes I do. As your best friend and most lucrative collaborator and temporary date replacement, it is my _duty_ to enjoy this.. This.” She bites the chicken off the end of the fork in punctuation, and chews doggedly, as though she might be able to draw Georgies attention away from the way her hand is creeping back towards the water jug. It’s been filled up twice since they sat down, and Georgie’s sure she’s only had one glass. She’s nearly finished her plate, though, while Melanie’s is still full. Or good as.

“You really don’t” she says again, looking back to Melanie’s face, flickering stoically in the candlelight. Still chewing. “All that stuff just means you have to turn up, and that’s a stretch. And you’re not a date stand in. I’m not like, sobbing in a corner anywhere. I dumped Nathan, not the other way around.”

Melanie finishes her bite and takes another gulp of the water. “Yeah, as he deserved! He was punching, anyway. But I’m still not going to let you go to a restaurant alone, so we are going to finish our food, come hell or high water, and then we are going to go back to yours, and have a drink or maybe three, and you’re going to tell me exactly why _Spirits and Giggles_ haven’t put out an episode for 5 months, because I know you know what’s going on with that team, and I’m _starved_ for gossip.”

In the space between her first collab with Melanie and now, Georgie’s come to learn a lot of things about the force behind _Ghost Hunt UK._ The first thing she’d learned was that Melanie was even more fun offscreen than she always seemed in her videos. The second, as they’d debated fiercely about the angle to take on a small haunted pub in Enfield, was that she was stubborn to an absurd degree. The third, as Georgie had uploaded the final product, was that if she wasn’t fully committed to whatever hill she was dying on, she wouldn’t actually stop Georgie from making the decisions. It was a mildly infuriating way to work, but every project they did together was more popular than the last. Georgie made a decision.

“OK, we’re getting something else.”

“What?”

“C’mon, I’m getting them to put this in a takeaway box and take it back to my flat because even the Admiral would enjoy it more than you are right now, and then we are going somewhere else to get some food you’ll actually eat.”

“I’m eating this!”

“You are not in the slightest eating that,” says Georgie, and flags down a waiter before Melanie can dig her heels in any more. 

The streets outside are dark, and she realises the reason the waitress had been glaring at them must have been that they’d taken far longer to order than she’d thought.

“So, where are we going?” asks Melanie, and Georgie looks over to her, watches the glow from the restaurant windows catch on the golden rings in her ears. Melanie’s voice is excited, and in the light the gold is warm and burnished. It looks like adventure.

“I don’t know anywhere else round here, but somewhere has to be open still, right?”

“Absolutely.”  
  


“I’m sorry you’ve had such a crap evening.” Georgie says about half an hour later, dropping down onto the steps leading up to a small in a doorway, much closer to Peckham than they had been when they started. They’ve been walking steadily through the main roads and everywhere they’ve come across is full, or way out of their price range, or in the case of one of the curry places, closed. (“On a Friday night?” Georgie had said, and Melanie had shrugged.)

“I didn’t,” Melanie insists, sitting down next to her, boots stretched down to the pavement. “I just didn’t get anything to eat, that’s all. I could always have the rest of that takeaway.”

“Do you actually want it?” Georgie asks.She begins to shuffle out of her backpack and Melanie pulls the straps back onto her shoulders, grinning.

“Oh, no, absolutely not, how do you eat that stuff, G, honestly-”

“G” is a new development. Georgie had hated it when Nathan had used it, but oddly she doesn’t mind it from Melanie. Possibly, she thinks, because Melanie had seemed so anxious the first time it had slipped out, and possibly, because Nathan hadn’t stopped saying it even when she’d asked, and she’s sure that if she so much as frowned at Melanie, she’d never hear it again.

“You’ve changed your tune,” she says, “I thought it was _new and exciting_ ”

Melanie grimaces “I was just being polite until I could confirm that you _weren’t_ secretly nursing a broken heart. Now I know you’re ok I need to stress to you that I’m never letting you take me there again.”

“Ugh, you’re just like my last ex”

“What, Nathan?”

“No, the one before- also a person with _no taste_.”

“You’ve had my banana bread,” Melanie grumbles, but she looks fond, and Georgie suddenly wants to apologise again. 

“Look, why don’t you come back to mine and I’ll make something for you,” she says, getting to her feet. Melanie looks up at her, her face lit intermittently by the small sputtering light left on over the door. There’s highlighter on her cheekbones and she’s bright and sparkling among the wrappers and papers that have blown into the corner of the doorway. 

“You really don’t have to do that,” she says, but when Georgie holds out her hand, Melanie takes it and lets Georgie haul her up to her feet. Standing face to face in the street, out of the light, she shakes her head and grins ruefully. “Fine, ok! If you insist, Miss Barker.” 

“I do, Miss King,” says Georgie, and hooks an arm around her elbow as she leads her down the road and gets her phone out to find the nearest night bus.

  
  


Melanie lives much closer than Georgie’s Hackney flat, but neither of them mention this as they find the bus stop, and hang around until the bus arrives. On the way, Melanie hops up into one of the taller seats by the driver and swings her boots like a teenager as Georgie tells her stories about Nathan that aren’t cruel but might be a bit unfair, and Melanie listens, and interjects with all the right criticisms, and when Georgie says “He didn’t like Hungarian food either,” Melanie scoffs and looks away exaggeratedly like she can’t believe her ears.

“How _dare_ he,” she says. “The fucking disrespect.”

Georgie looks up at her, at the way the fluorescent bus light are turning the frizz around her head into a halo and reflecting off the black of her leather jacket like she’s some edgy saviour angel and says “Thanks for not letting me eat my weird salty food alone”

“I told you, I’m a good friend,” says Melanie, and she almost looks like she’s about to say something else, but the bus announces their stop and they both scramble for the button like they’re ten years old and still excited to push it.

  
They’re piling out onto the road before Georgie turns to Melanie and grabs her arm. “Shit.” she says. “ I don’t have anything in, oh _shit_ , it’s just like.. Toast.”

She wants to apologise again, but she knows Melanie won’t take it, and she starts racking her brain for takeaways nearby that’ll still be taking orders, before she realises Melanie’s still walking. 

“Melanie, I don’t have anything to feed you, I’m so-”

“Chips,” says Melanie, still not stopping.

“Sorry?”

“There’s a chippy round the corner, right? Let’s just get some fish and chips Georgie, honestly you’re fine. I can bitch about Tom’s crappy sound editing with you and get your inside information on that weird theatre in Fulham just as well over chips as I can over whatever you were going to make. Just- chill, yeah?”

“Yeah, ok” Georgie says, and follows Melanie down towards the chippy. She doesn’t know why she’s so fixed on being able to give Melanie dinner, why she’s so irritated that her fridge is empty. They’ve crashed at each other’s loads while editing, eaten leftovers and takeaways and had dinner for breakfast the next day. It feels different tonight though, when Melanie’s taken the time to come out with her so she’s not alone, when she’d sat in that restaurant for an hour without complaining, when she’s barely even mentioned their next project the whole time. It feels like something’s shifting, like when she watches Melanie set up to film and realises she’s lit the room in ways that bring out shadowy crevices Georgie would never have spotted.

They hurry down the street towards the smell of frying and the small clusters of people halfway through their nights out crowded around the door. This is the only place nearby open this late, and Georgie reckons they’re the most sober people there, as she watches a pair of girls stumble out of the door and across the road, clutching the polystyrene yellow boxes in one hand, and each other's waist in the other. As she enters the shop, she can feel the warmth hit her, and in front of her, Melanie takes her hands out of her pocket and blows on her chipped nails. 

“What’re you getting?” she asks, and Georgie shakes her head.

“I already ate, remember?”

“Yeah and then we walked around South London for ages, so you can’t still be full. And I’m not just getting food for myself.” This might be a hill Melanie is willing to die on.

“ _Fine_ , chips and gravy then.”

“You’re a cliche,” says Melanie, but she goes over to the counter all the same, and Georgie leans against the bar at the other wall and scans the array of newspaper articles on the wall proclaiming all the ways in which this chippy has beaten other chippies in Hackney/London/the South East. The glowing heat behind the counter makes the whole shop look soft and inviting, and Melanie looks right at home as she orders.

“The guy _asked_ if I wanted cod, what sort of weirdos live round here?” Melanie asks, when she brings the two yellow polystyrene boxes back over to Georgie’s spot by the door.

“Ugh,” says Georgie, grabbing a fistful of the little sauce packets as they head back out into the night.

They have to push past a clump of students loudly arguing over where they’ve left the missing member of their group to get out, and Georgie’s stuck for a second as Melanie ducks past an elbow that Georgie’s too tall to avoid. 

“What actually are the other options, really? Like, who goes to a chippy and gets anything else?”

“I think haddock’s up there,” says Georgie. She’d been planning to walk them straight back towards the flat, but now that she’s outside, she just heads a little way down the road and leans against one of the unoccupied bike racks to open up her chips.

“See what I mean?” says Melanie, joining her. She sits back against the bike rack opposite Georgie and offers over a small wooden fork. “Who gets battered haddock and chips? Who is that person? I could do an episode on them, I bet, it’s that wrong. Can I get some of the vinegar?”

Georgie holds out the sauce packets she’d got and watches Melanie take a few. “I knew a guy once who had that order, actually.” 

“Fuck _off_ , was he a murderer?”

Georgie laughs “No, but he does- ok, you know the Magnus Institute?”

Melanie looks up from where she’s carefully drowning her chips in an unholy amount of vinegar. “What, Nutcase HQ? Haven to drunk girls and guys who saw Elvis while high across the country?”

“Yeah, he works there.”

Melanie snorts as she attacks her chips. “That proves my point, see? Only something for creeps to eat.”

“Sure, ok,” says Georgie, tilting her head back to look up at the sky. There’s no stars that she can see, but there’s a plane crossing the pace between clouds above her, and she points it out to Melanie.

“D’you think in 50 years we’ll wish on those instead?” she asks, and Melanie hums quietly. A siren goes off in the distance, and Georgie looks back down from the sky to see Melanie watching her, a soft silhouette in the light spilling out from the chippy. She gets the impression suddenly that this whole evening has been a study in angles, that she’s spent it watching Melanie step in and out of the shadows, seeing a different edge to her each time. 

“I don’t see why we can’t already,” says Melanie, and Georgie starts. She hadn’t realised Melanie was still thinking about the question.

“What would you wish for?” she asks, looking down at her chips again. They’re a comforting warmth in her hands, like the weight of the Admiral on her lap. She’s glad Melanie made her get them.

“Dunno,” says Melanie, pulling her fish apart with her fork. “Universal Basic Income? The death of Piers Morgan? Youtube changing their algorithm? I’m bad at wishes, I want too much crap. What would you wish for?”

Georgie thinks for a moment. “I’m not sure either,” she says, even though she feels like some part of her, deep down, knows the right answer.

Melanie looks up again. “Maybe it’s easier with real stars. Too much light pollution here, you know?”

Georgie looks at her, staring up into space, bright and warm and lovely. “I don’t mind it.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Title from RQG! Thanks Bryn
> 
> 2\. Every WTGfs fic i ever write is an excuse to invent other ghosthunting shows with bad puns for names
> 
> 3\. For once, not all of this fic is geographically accurate! I couldn't be bothered to find a chippy close enough to where I've assigned Georgie's flat. The Hungarian restaurant is real though, it's called The Rosemary. I've never been, I'm sure the food is lovely.
> 
> 4\. My self hatred and my melanie kinning were full on fighting as I wrote this, you're welcome
> 
> 5\. Look I just really miss going out ok


End file.
